FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT FEDS - PAGE 5

Federal authorities and Chicago police executed a search warrant Monday at a River Forest residence in connection with an investigation into a series of suspicious mailings to politicians, sources said. Investigators from the Joint Terrorism Task Force were at the home in the western suburb Monday afternoon, Ross Rice, a spokesman for the FBI confirmed. No one had been arrested or charged in the case by Monday evening, Rice said. Envelopes containing what turned out to be talcum powder were mailed to Mayor Richard Daley and Cook County Board President Todd Stroger in 2007 as well as to Chicago aldermen in 2007 and 2008.

Joe Caputo's efforts to secretly record his company ripping off the government didn't always go smoothly. There was the time a co-worker at the suburban defense contractor playfully elbowed him and bumped the recording device hidden in his shirt pocket. "He said, 'What's that?' And I told him it was a heart monitor," Caputo recalled Thursday. "I said I had been having heart palpitations and they were being monitored. But I told him not to say anything to anyone because I didn't want (the company)

Scratch that popular 10-day early-nuisance Canada goose season we`ve enjoyed around Chicago the last few Septembers. The Department of Conservation was unable to convince federal waterfowl honchos that the paltry 2,000 or so geese taken in northeast Illinois do not include more than 10 percent migrants. The feds are so afraid that local hunters will kill too many migrants in the early season-even though there is no evidence migrants arrive here before October-that they elected to pull the plug on the entire hunt.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's office investigated the Cook County Bureau of Human Resources for about three years from about 2006 to 2009, according to a petition filed Wednesday in Cook County Circuit Court. The federal investigation included questioning of six Cook County human resources employees "on matters directly relating to their daily employment" for the county, according to court records. At the time, the employees agreed to retain and pay for their own attorneys because representation by the state's attorney's office was deemed a "conflict of interest," according to the records.

I'm no epidemiologist, but I'm worried that a terrible new outbreak of Fedheimer's is spreading through Chicago's City Hall. As loyal readers know, Fedheimer's (pronounced Fed-hyme-rz) is triggered by federal investigators hunting political corruption. For reasons as yet undetermined by modern science, this causes some politicians to forget lotsa stuff. And tings. They forget tings too. Stuff, tings and like that. Fedheimer's struck again Tuesday, caused by a front-page Tribune story by reporters Dan Mihalopoulos and Hugh Dellios.

Coming this fall: A new prime-time drama series takes a closeup look at an elite federal agency and the dedicated men and women who hunt deadly terrorists and treacherous criminals. The new show's on CBS. It's also on NBC. And ABC. And Fox. There's "24" on Fox, a tightly structured drama about CIA counterterrorism experts. There's CBS' "The Agency," an insiderish look at the CIA, and its counterterrorism experts. There's "Alias" on ABC, about a graduate student who thinks she has joined the CIA and is working to, you know, counter terrorism.

Federal prosecutors rested their case Monday against a developer accused of bribing former Chicago Ald. Isaac "Ike" Carothers without calling the ex-alderman, despite his pleading guilty and agreeing to testify. Prosecutors declined to comment on the strategic decision, but the absence of Carothers deprives Calvin Boender's trial of its likely dramatic highlight. He is charged with paying for nearly $38,000 in improvements to Carothers' home to gain the alderman's support for a major real estate project in his ward.

"Feds" isn`t unpleasant, but it isn`t much of anything else. This benign comedy about two female FBI recruits (Rebecca DeMornay and Mary Gross) had Ivan Reitman, of "Ghostbusters" and "Stripes," as its executive producer, and it reflects his taste for a relatively gentle, user-friendly humor, heavy on feelings of comradeship and pleasure in jobs well done. Unfortunately, director and cowriter Dan Goldberg, one of the screenwriters of "Stripes," did not provide any jokes to go with the warm sentiments, resulting in a film that often is likable but seems to have no particular reason to exist.

If you want to see Mayor Richard Daley's rant blasting federal investigators as "corrupt" you better not go to the mayor's official YouTube site that debuted this week. Tuesday's rant isn't on the site. Neither are the sneers, or video clips in which he releases his inner Mayor Chucky. In fact, there's no bad mojo on his official YouTube site. But off site, in a place called reality, the mayor of Chicago was complaining about federal law enforcement. Daley said they're wasting their resources, going after pro athletes like Michael Vick and Barry Bonds and not prosecuting those evil drug lords who make all the money.

Any doubts as to where the feds are headed with their investigations into political corruption at City Hall should have ended late Tuesday afternoon. Expect them to keep traveling along the City Hall pipeline. Assistant U.S. Atty. Philip Guentert, the chief of the public corruption unit, hinted as much during his closing arguments Tuesday in the federal corruption case against four of Mayor Richard Daley's political underlings. The four are charged with fraud in an alleged massive job-rigging scheme to create patronage armies allowing Daley to crush his enemies and reward his friends.